was due to be demobilised: he had lost his legs either from an explosion or a burst of heavy machine-gun fire. Five or six of the lads were lying piled up in a natural cave on the terrace. They had been cut down either by a machine-gun burst or when the rebels had started to throw hand grenades. So there they lay together where death had caught up with them. We took the bodies across the river mechanically, as if we were asleep. The sight of the bodies was terrible.
‘There were rags of something hanging on a tree and below it a mess. Evidently a bullet had hit a mine that one of the soldiers had been carrying.
‘Suddenly we heard a weak groan some distance off from the hollow, by the rocks. We carefully went towards the noise and came across a soldier who was still alive. His shin had been shot off and was hanging by rags of tendon. He was weakened by loss of blood, but he had managed to put a tourniquet round his leg and stem the flow. We gave him first aid and took him to the vehicles. He survived. There were no weapons left—they had all been collected by the rebels.
‘On the morning of 2 May we returned to the regimental armoured group. The bodies were lying on a stony beach in rows. There were about fifty of them. We were told that some had already been taken away. Our company commander, Lieutenant Kurdiuk, was lying on his back with his elbows bent and his fists clenched, and across his chest you could see a line of bullet holes. It was said that he had been shot by the Afghan soldiers who were marching with the battalion when they started to desert to the rebels, but he had time to order the lads to fire on them.’54
This operation too was described by the Soviets as a victory. After it was over, Marshal Sokolov flew to Rukha, the chief town in the valley, to see things for himself. There was nothing to see. Soviet tanks were standing around in the wheat fields. But there was little damage and no sign of the locals. Sokolov called a meeting in the house which was being used by the staff. There were three Afghans there—the
The generals reported to Sokolov that three thousand rebels had opposed the incursion. Seventeen hundred had been killed, and the survivors had retreated into the mountains, carrying the bodies of their dead comrades with them. That was why there was so little to be seen.
Leonid Shebarshin, the Deputy Chief of the Analytical Department of the KGB’s Foreign Intelligence Headquarters in Moscow, was also present. He was not impressed by the figures being bandied around. How many casualties had there been on the Soviet side? How could thirteen hundred rebel survivors have carried seventeen hundred corpses? How could the corpses have been counted, since they were nowhere to be seen? He discovered the answer. Enemy casualties were estimated according to a formula based on the amount of ammunition expended. This charmingly precise formula had enabled the Soviets to claim that the rebels had lost thirty thousand men every year since 1982.55
Sokolov reported to Ustinov that 2,800 rebels had been killed and thirty captured. He told Karmal that the way had now been cleared for the Afghan authorities to set up a civilian administration and launch programmes of social and economic reform for the benefit of the peasantry in the valley.56 Only later did it become clear that Masud, forewarned by his agents in Kabul, had again withdrawn most of his forces to safety before the attack. That was why the Soviet troops had met with so little serious opposition. Their losses came chiefly from mines and ambushes as they were combing through villages. The long-range bombers had had little effect on a dispersed enemy and a rural countryside: as the wretched infantrymen said, ‘They didn’t earn their chocolate.’57 Masud’s prestige among his own people increased still further. He was able to extend his control in the northern provinces of the country and grew from being an ordinary field commander to being a major political figure, well known inside and outside Afghanistan.
Sergeant Morozov’s commander, Captain Khabarov, never got over his bitterness at the way these operations were conducted. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did we leave the Pandsher so quickly? What was the point of the operation?… Throughout the whole of that war practically every operation ended in the same way. Military operations began, soldiers and officers died, Afghan soldiers died, the mujahedin and the peaceful population died, and when the operation was over our forces would leave, and everything would return to what it had been before. I still feel guilty and bitter about the Afghan government forces… whom we betrayed and sold down the river when we left Afghanistan, leaving them and their families to the mercy of the victors.’58
The sledgehammer blows were incapable of cracking the nut of an elusive, uncoordinated guerrilla enemy. These operations usually succeeded in their immediate objectives. The garrison would be relieved, the base would be destroyed, the valley occupied. But the Russians never had sufficient troops to hold the ground they took. After a successful operation they would withdraw to their bases and hand responsibility to their Afghan allies. But the government’s military and civilian representatives found it impossible to operate amid a hostile population. Too often, under moral and military pressure from the mujahedin, they abandoned their posts, deserted, or went over to the enemy.
And so the Russians discovered, as other armies have discovered in Afghanistan before and since, that once you have taken the ground you need troops to hold it. They might dominate the towns and the villages by day. But the mujahedin would rule them by night. They never broke the rebels’ grip on the countryside or closed the frontier through which the rebels received their supplies.
In the end the Russians had good tactics but no workable strategy. They could win their fights, but they could not convincingly win the war. Their best efforts, military and political, went for nothing. They eventually had no choice but to disentangle themselves as best they could.
– TEN –
Devastation and Disillusion
Armies are institutions for organising and channelling violence in the pursuit of some concept of the national interest. They help to focus the emotions of patriotism, self-sacrifice, and solidarity which states need for their coherence and sometimes for their survival.
Violence is not easy to control, and armies have to cope with violence within their own ranks as well as atrocities against the enemy and the civilian population. Otherwise they risk a breakdown of discipline and a loss of function. Wellington was notoriously severe in his determination to keep his army—‘the scum of the earth enlisted for drink’—under control. Even he did not always succeed.
But commanders also have to preserve the morale of their men and the principle—itself important for effective cohesion—of the ‘honour of the uniform’. Time and again, and in all armies, this leads to evasion and cover-up to prevent the stories of military crimes emerging or to limit their consequences: because of the pressure of military and public opinion the US authorities found it impossible to bring to account all those responsible for the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968. Commanders in the 40th Army were no different. They were blamed by their generals for not exercising a more effective discipline. Fearing for their careers, they often responded by writing off suicides and murders as battle casualties. Some crimes could not be concealed. But there were plenty of other cases where officers managed to avoid formal inquiry into the actions of themselves or their men. And things such as the destruction of villages suspected of harbouring insurgents or firing on the troops were regarded as a legitimate, or at least an unavoidable, act of war.
The 40th Army made it clear enough to its soldiers what would happen if they misbehaved. In 1985 they produced a little booklet ‘The Life, Habits and Customs of the Peoples of Afghanistan: Rules and Norms of Behaviour for Military Personnel Serving outside their Own Country’.1 This described the country and its people, their religion, their fierce sense of independence, their housing, clothing and food, their customs of mutual
